Comparative LCA of Polylactic Acid Production in Uruguay: Ring-Opening Polymerization vs. Direct Polycondensation with Solid-State Polymerization

Main Presenter:    Axel Ríos 

Co-Authors:   Goycoechea Nicolás     Castelló Elena      Valeria Larnaudie                                    

This study evaluates the environmental impacts of medical-grade polylactic acid (PLA) production in Uruguay through a “gate-to-gate” Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The research compares the established industrial route of ring-opening polymerization (ROP), designated as Scenario A, with the emerging technological alternative of direct polycondensation followed by solid-state polymerization (SSP), designated as Scenario B. While the environmental performance of ROP has been extensively documented in literature (e.g., Zhang et al.,2025 and Islam et al., 2025), there is a knowledge gap regarding the life cycle performance of the SSP pathway.

The functional unit is defined as 1 kg of high molecular weight PLA (>200,000 g/mol). The assessment was performed using OpenLCA 2.5.0 software with the ecoinvent 3.11 database, employing the ReCiPe 2016 v1.03 midpoint (H) methodology. For Scenario A, the inventory was modeled using mass flows from Aspen Plus simulations by Martinez (2011) and a heat balance, while Scenario B was based on batch process data from Fukushima et al. (2000). Due to the lack of specific industrial data for SSP, energy consumption for Scenario B was estimated through global heat balances and technical extrapolations from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) production.

The results indicate that Scenario A exhibits superior environmental performance across all evaluated impact categories. This disparity could be attributed to the higher technological maturity and industrial optimization of the ROP route, compared with the still-emerging and less optimized SSP process. Climate change analysis reveals that electrical consumption is the critical hotspot for both systems, accounting for 73% of total emissions in Scenario A and 57% in Scenario B.

A significant finding in Scenario B was the 18% contribution to climate change from tosylic acid production. Since inventory data for tosylic acid were unavailable, its environmental burden was approximated using toluene as a proxy compound, as toluene is a precursor in the synthesis of tosylic acid. However, this approximation does not account for the additional processing steps which may lead to an underestimation of the associated environmental load. In conclusion, while the ROP route is currently more favorable, the results for SSP serve as a conservative baseline highlighting the need for technological refinement and more precise inventory data for catalysts to reduce uncertainty in future biopolymer implementations.

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